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Israeli army shooting of Israeli stirs hot debate
Khaleej Times, (Reuters)
28 December 2003
JERUSALEM - Israelis hotly debated on Sunday just who crossed a red line: a young Israeli who joined Palestinians and foreign sympathisers in a protest against a West Bank barrier, or soldiers who shot him.
Gil Naamati, a 21-year-old kibbutz member who recently completed his compulsory military service, was hit in his knee and hip with live ammunition on Friday as he tried to cut through the razor wire topped fence. An American woman was also wounded.
Unlike hundreds of incidents in which soldiers have killed or wounded Palestinians since an uprising began in September 2000, the army’s first use of live gunfire against an Israeli was a shot heard across the Jewish state.
“Today they shot my son, tomorrow they’ll shoot yours,” Naamati’s father, Uri, told Israel Radio. The army said it had begun an investigation. Its chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Moshe Yaalon, visited the wounded Israeli protester -- a member of a fringe Israeli group called ”Anarchists Against the Fence” -- in hospital.
“I explained to him that it wasn’t right that they shot me and he said it also wasn’t right that I cut the fence,” Naamati, speaking from his hospital bed, said on Army Radio.
Israel says the barrier it is building of fences, concrete walls and trenches, cutting deep into land Palestinians want for a state, is aimed at stopping infiltration by suicide bombers. Palestinians call it a land grab.
Meanwhile, left-wing opposition politicians demanded to know why troops had used lethal means to disperse dozens of unarmed protesters gathered behind a locked gate 20 metres (yards) away.
“In a law-abiding country, you don’t shoot civilians,” said Avshalom Vilan, a legislator from Meretz, a dovish party whose land-for-peace message has been drowned out by more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.
A news photographer at the scene said on Israel Radio that he and other journalists had told the soldiers they were shooting at fellow Israelis, but the troops ignored him.
Yaalon said the protesters had only themselves to blame. ”They masqueraded as Arabs, mingled with Palestinians and entered the...Palestinian side of the fence (area) illegally,” he told Israel radio.
Deputy Defence Minister Zeev Boim said soldiers followed orders by first shouting warnings and firing warning shots before aiming at the protesters’ legs.
Israel’s biggest newspaper, the mainstream Yedioth Ahronoth, said the soldiers’ behaviour was a symptom of the “bestiality which the continuing occupation and war situation...has created within the army and the Israeli consciousness as a whole.
“Let’s not kid ourselves...if a Palestinian (had been shot), it probably would not have got even one line in the newspaper,” the editorial added.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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